Motivational Quotes

Ideas

Ideas are, in truth, force.

- James, Henry

Best Quotes about Ideas

A handsome parson is fit for nothing but ti put ideas into the young woman's heads.

Judith Brocklehurst

Little words hurt big ideas.

Newton, Howard W.

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.

Hyman Rickover

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

Whitehead, Alfred North

Ideas not coupled with action never become bigger than the brain cells they occupied.

Glasgow, Arnold H.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

James, Henry

A new idea is like a child. It's easier to conceive than to deliver.

Koysis, Ted

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

John Cage

The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

10.

The most important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

Bragg, Sir William

11.

We are not to make the ideas of contentment and aspiration quarrel, for God made them fast friends. A man may aspire, and yet be quite content until it is time to raise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one contentment. The very fruit of the gospel is aspiration. It is to the heart what spring is to the earth, making every root, and bud, and bough desire to be more. -

Beecher, Henry Ward

12.

Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studious contemplation but an action, even if it is only an inner action. Their acquisition obligates each man in some way to change his life, even if it is only his inner life. They demand to be stood for. They dictate where a man must concentrate his vision. They determine his moral and intellectual priorities. They provide him with allies and make him enemies. In short, ideas impose an interest in their ultimate fate which goes far beyond the realm of the merely reasonable.

Decter, Midge

13.

I'm not impressed with the power of a corporate president. I am impressed with the power of ideas.

Mason, Ken

14.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Mann, Thomas

15.

Every new idea is an impossibility until it is born.

Brown, Ron

16.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rohn, Jim

17.

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than politicians think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas... that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

Foucault, Michel

18.

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

Hubbard, Elbert

19.

Good ideas are a dime a dozen, bad ones are free.

Horton, Doug

20.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man. --

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

Bachelard, Gaston

22.

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

23.

Ideas won't work unless you do.

24.

Man's fear of ideas is probably the greatest dike holding back human knowledge and happiness.

Ernst, Morris L.

25.

I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.

Samuel Goldwyn

26.

A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.

Maritain, Jacques

27.

The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.

William O. Douglas

28.

If you have the same ideas as everybody else but have them one week earlier than everyone else then you will be hailed as a visionary. But if you have them five years earlier you will be named a lunatic.

Jones, Barry

29.

It is the nature of thought to find its way into action.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

30.

An idea is the only level which moves the world.

Corey, Arthur F.

31.

A crank is someone with a new idea -- until it catches on.

Twain, Mark

32.

Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the ocean desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.

Carl Schurz

33.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Heilbrun, Carolyn

34.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

35.

Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever.

Trotsky, Leon

36.

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you only have one.

Chartier, Alain

37.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.

Edison, Thomas A.

38.

It doesn't matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.

Canetti, Elias

39.

In Texas, years ago, almost all of the oil came from surface operations. Then someone got the idea that there were greater sources of supply deeper down. A well was drilled five thousand feet deep. The result? A gusher. Too many of us operate on the surface. We never go deep enough to find supernatural resources. The result is, we never operate at our best. More time and investment is involved to go deep but a gusher will pay off.

Montapert, Alfred A.

40.

Long is the road from conception to completion.

Moliere

41.

It's very good for an idea to be commonplace. The important thing is that a new idea should develop out of what is already there so that it soon becomes an old acquaintance. Old acquaintances aren't by any means always welcome, but at least one can't be mistaken as to who or what they are.

Fitzgerald, Penelope

42.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

43.

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

Howard Aiken

44.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

45.

There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.